Well if you want to be really nitpicky it was Irrational Games in Australia. They weren't "2K" then.

IG Australia, IG Boston, who cares. They both seemed to have the task of taking Sierra/VUG games and dumbing them down for the masses. The end result actually was watered down games that didn't appeal to either the hardcore fan or the casual gamer. They killed both series that they were hired to bring to a larger audience.

CK: You know, we have to rely on our hardcore audience, and expand that to a bigger audience. So, you don't want to alienate your hardcore audience. And, often, the hardest thing for us is... we always hit this thing, we're like, "Oh, these guys are dumbing it down for the console gamers!"

And that's not what we're doing

Sure, you didn't dumb down Tribes Vengeance or Swat 4 for the masses. Right.

Chris Kline is the same guy that admitted he never played Swat 3 even though he was a lead developer on Swat 4. Maybe if he cared about the "hardcore" audience he would have actually tried the original before working on the sequel?

"The radio-station idea may have been pioneered by other open-world games"

That sounds a lot like a PR department wrote that. What game review website would be afraid to say GTA? Only a PR department would not want to use a brand name for fear of copyright infringement or negative brand association.